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The data center industry has come a long way from the days when organizations closely guarded their efficiency secrets. Facebook is now the poster child for green-data center openness: Not only has the company shared details about its data center equipment and designs through its Open Compute Project, it is now providing the public with a near-real-time view of its data centers' energy efficiency via online dashboards. Beyond that, Facebook is offering the code to let other companies create dashboards of their own to make public their data centers' ongoing efficiency metrics.

Facebook's rationale for exposing its data center operations, according to McTiernan, is that "we think it's important to demystify data centers and share more about what our operations really look like. Through the OCP (Open Compute Project), we've shared the building and hardware designs for our data centers. These dashboards are the natural next step, since they answer the question, 'What really happens when those servers are installed and the power's turned on?'"

McTiernan cautioned that data center-metric voyeurs will "probably see some weird numbers from time to time" because the dashboards are surfacing raw data collected in environments with so many shifting variables. "We believe in iteration, in getting projects out the door and improving them over time. So we welcome you behind the curtain, wonky numbers and all," she wrote. "As our data centers near completion and our load evens out, we expect these inevitable fluctuations to correspondingly decrease."

Facebook is inviting other organizations to follow its lead and is even offering the tools to help: The company and partner AREA 17, which designed the visualizations, are open-sourcing the front-end code for the dashboards, which they will publish to the OPC GitHub repository in coming weeks. "All you have to do is connect your own CSV files to get started. And in the spirit of all other technologies shared via OCP, we encourage you to poke through the code and make updates to it," McTiernan wrote.